Publicizing MacPorts

[Steven Smith]

> What Ryan is trying to say is that "MacPorts" is in fact just a set of
> random volunteer contributors

That’s begging the question of an effective communications strategy. A distributed model of random volunteers is perfect for aggregating git commits. It’s highly ineffective at communicating important news from that organization.

If MacPorts wants to communicate better, it must post important announcements like “MacPorts supports the new Apple silicon M1” at a MacPorts website, and someone with a macports.org address must send emails to a few tech reporters that say “look at this please.”

> We would be grateful if more users/contributors could join the boat
> and actively help in areas where they feel that they could contribute
> to the project (in one way or another).

That’s precisely why a more effective and realistic commutations strategy is desirable.

> If someone is willing to step up and write blog posts, articles
> (potentially based on a few rounds of questions/answers/document
> revisions), etc., that would certainly be more than welcome.

I’d wager that many people would write these, but the channel and infrastructure for this do not now exist: no MacPorts News/Announcements page, no blog page, a somnambulant Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/macports, and no peer review control mechanism. This can be accomplished by providing such tools to divide-and-conquer, with an open peer review mechanism for contributors without commit authority.


> On Apr 20, 2021, at 03:05, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 at 15:14, Steven Smith <steve.t.smith at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> If you have contacts to tech reporters, please use them. I don't have any. If Ars Technica or any other news site wants to cover MacPorts, they can do that any time.
>> 
>> This is the wrong attitude.
>> 
>> MacPorts must tell them, not some random user/contributer like me.
> 
> What Ryan is trying to say is that "MacPorts" is in fact just a set of
> random volunteer contributors, each with his/her own talents (and many
> of those without time/motivation to write or without writing skills),
> with a varying level of expertise and available time to devote to the
> project. There is not even any legal entity in the background (there
> probably should be one at some point).
> 
> We would be grateful if more users/contributors could join the boat
> and actively help in areas where they feel that they could contribute
> to the project (in one way or another).
> 
> If you have good ideas about how to improve and promote the project,
> there is no reason why you couldn't take part in the joint effort to
> make the product better in the long run.
> 
> If someone is willing to step up and write blog posts, articles
> (potentially based on a few rounds of questions/answers/document
> revisions), etc., that would certainly be more than welcome.
> 
> Mojca